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ServiceMax Blog: Posts Tagged ‘Wilmette’

The recent polar vortex dropped Chicagoland into an extreme deep freeze, bottoming out the temperature at a record-breaking low. We hope you and your family made it through this intense weather—you’ve probably never loved your home heating system as much as you did during this time!

Now that the freeze of the vortex has passed, you may be thinking about what might have happened if the power went out in your home during the extreme cold. It’s not a pleasant thought. In fact, it’s bit terrifying. Unfortunately, extreme weather conditions are when power outages are most likely. During this warmer stretch of weather, you might be giving serious thought to having your home’s electrical power protected with a whole-house generator. This is great planning, and we offer professional services to install a whole-house generator in Wilmette, IL or elsewhere in Chicagoland. Don’t hesitate to call us to ask for more information.

At ServiceMax, we offer a wide range of services for our customers. We’re both an electrical and HVAC contractor for Wilmette, IL and the rest of Chicagoland. This puts us in the special position of understanding the electrical issues that may affect an air conditioning system during the summer. That’s good news—because electrical malfunctions are the most common type in air conditioners. It only takes a few wiring glitches in your home’s AC to turn a pleasant summer day indoors into a sweatbox!

The question in the headline may sound a bit melodramatic. But when it comes to home heating and air conditioning in Wilmette, IL, you don’t want to take chances. The summers are too hot, and the winters to intense, for you to end up with a subpar comfort system in your home. You’ve probably lived most of your life in homes that use a combination of an air conditioner and a furnace. Perhaps you’re accustomed to a boiler for winter heating and window units for cooling. Whatever the situation, you used two separate appliances for heating and cooling. A heat pump changes that—it’s a single appliance that provides central both heating a cooling. That’s a big change, and you don’t want to make the leap to using one unless you’re certain it’s the best move for your home.

What type of heating system do you use to warm up your house during a tough Chicagoland winter? If your home is like the majority, the answer is a natural gas furnace. Gas furnaces are the most common type of residential heating system across the country, especially in locations with cold winters. Gas furnaces not only produce a large amount of heat, they do so at less expense than electric furnaces because natural gas costs less than electricity per unit.

However, any natural gas appliance has the potential to develop safety hazards. We don’t want to alarm you, as a well-maintained gas furnace will rarely encounter dangers, and current furnace models are built with safety in mind and have special features to prevent the escape of carbon monoxide or a rise in combustion hazards.

There is one gas furnace problem we want to draw your attention to, because it’s the most common reason for a furnace allowing toxic gasses into a home: the cracked heat exchanger.

At Malek Heating & Cooling, we understand that helping people find ideal comfort in their homes means more than ensuring they have an air conditioning and heating system that will provide the right temperatures around the year. It also means finding the correct balance of relative humidity, keeping the air from becoming too muggy or too dry. That’s why we install both whole-house humidifiers and whole-house dehumidifiers for our customers’ homes.

But what is “relative humidity”? It’s a phrase you’ve probably heard before, yet not known exactly what it means or why it’s important when it comes to comfort. Let’s take a look at this term and why high and low relative humidity can both be problems.

It’s May, and chances are that you’re already getting some use from your air conditioning system in Wilmette, IL. It may be only a few days during the week for short stretches—we aren’t fully done with the cool weather yet—but it will be enough for you to tell if something major is wrong with the air conditioner. For example, you’ll know when the air coming from room vents isn’t cool when the AC is running.

Obviously, a cooling system that doesn’t actually cool is not much use to you. It’s just acting like a big fan, and that doesn’t help when temperatures climb. There are a number of possibilities for why an air conditioner will lose its cooling power. Some are simple errors that you can correct yourself. Others are more complicated and will require HVAC technicians to diagnose and correct them. And some are serious trouble that place your AC in danger of a major failure, possibly even an early replacement, unless professionally fixed as soon as possible.

There are many proverbs about the strange weather that occurs in March. You may have heard that March “comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb.” Or perhaps you’ve heard it “comes in like a lamb and leaves like a lion.” That’s the nature of the weather during this month that straddles winter and spring: it’s difficult to predict exactly which way the temperature will go—especially in a place like Chicago. (And no, groundhogs are not an effective way of predicting weather patterns in late winter.)

The important lesson to learn about March weather uncertainty is to make sure that your home comfort system is ready for any extreme. A cold snap, an early arrival of spring heat, or both—see that your heating and cooling system are prepped!

Air filters, pl. noun: Devices that remove air contaminants by using a mesh of filters to trap particles in the air flow that moves through them.

Air purifiers, pl. noun: Electronic installations placed into HVAC systems that use ionization, UV radiation, oxidation, or other methods to eliminate pollutants without using filtration. Syn: air scrubbers, air cleaners.

Now that we’ve put up those two definitions, the next question is, “Okay, which one is the best for improving my home’s indoor air quality?”

There are more options for water heaters today than there were a few decades ago. Back then, “water heater” almost always meant a storage tank water heater, a system that uses a supply of water kept at a constant temperature inside a tank using gas jets or electrical heating elements. But today there are tankless systems as well as systems that rely on different sources of power, like the heat pump water heater. This type of heat pump removes heat from the surrounding air and then applies it to the water. A heat pump water heater is extremely energy efficient and costs much less to run than a standard electric water heater.

The term radiant heat refers to any kind of heat that comes off a heated surface. You feel radiant heat coming from the metal of the sides of buildings during a hot day, or coming up from asphalt. But when it comes to home heating, radiant heating means a particular type of comfort system: hot water circulated from a boiler raises the temperature of pipes running through a subfloor, which in turn heats up the floorboards. These heated surfaces then send heat waves into the room. (You can also have radiant heating through room radiators or baseboard heaters.)